Without exception, the best conversations I've had with any
of the elementary school students I've taught have always been the ones I'm not
really supposed to be having.

Without exception, the best conversations I've had with any of the
elementary school students I've taught have always been the ones I'm
not really supposed to be having. Nowhere in the Boston Standards of
Learning does it say that I'm to teach my 1st grade students the
origins of the names of the days of the week, but when they asked about
this one morning, I couldn't help tabling a lesson on sentence
structure to give them some answers. I told them what I knew—
Saturday is named for Saturn, Wednesday for Woden, Monday is the moon's
day, and Sunday is the sun's day—and then gave a short overview
of mythology to tide them over until I could research the rest. I'm
glad I digressed; if I hadn't, I doubt Christopher ever would have
asked me his question, the one that would have stumped a roomful of
philosophers. He asked: "Ms. Ehrenfeld, if people believe in the gods,
do the gods believe in people?" Hard to get a question like that when
you're drilling them on the appropriate placement of capital
letters.

There are many people who would say that two months of poetry, or a morning spent discussing Greek and Roman mythology, are stealing valuable time from the curriculum.

Not all of my conversations with my students lead to the kinds of
questions that leave me speechless or sleepless; some conversations are
purely silly, some are ethical debates, some are just brief
speculations on a small but significant topic of interest. And
sometimes it's not even a conversation that transforms my classroom
into someplace mystical; it's just a moment or a mood that appears out
of nowhere and disappears immediately unless noticed. Yet all of these
times are essential to the kind of classroom I want to create for the
children—the kind of classroom where the paths we travel are
sometimes mine and sometimes theirs, where their curiosity is given as
much space as they need it to have, as much air as they need for their
exploration of the world to survive.

Creating this world for the children also means sometimes accepting
that I won't be able to follow all the startling twists and bends of
their seemingly illogical logic, or that when I do finally figure out
what they're saying, the conversation may be long finished and
forgotten.

This happens to me one day in December, in my 1st grade classroom,
as I am getting ready to start my morning meeting with the children. I
look down at Nequan, seated on a pillow just in front of my rocking
chair, and notice that the pillow is strewn with tiny white crystals of
some unknown substance. Great, I think, it's not bad enough
they give me their colds and flus and rashes, now they're bringing me
anthrax?

I look at Nequan, who grins up at me. "Nequan," I ask, "what is all
over that pillow?"

I give him my best FBI interrogation look, and ask again. "What is
on the pillow?"

Another shrug. "Sugar?" he tries, clearly hoping I'll be satisfied
with this and move on to the "Good Morning Song." No such luck.

"Where did it come from?"

By now, the guilty look has completely eclipsed the grin. "My
pocket?"

"Your pocket?"

He does a quick check, then affirms his answer: "My pocket."

"How did it get there?"

He thinks. "It fell in?" He looks up at me quickly, trying to see if
I'll buy that answer.

"Nequan, sugar does not just fall into your pocket. How did it get
there?"

"I put it in?"

"Why on earth did you put sugar in your pocket?"

Just a hint of a shrug this time, then a more assertive answer: "For
my raisins."

Do I want to keep asking him questions? I'm starting to feel as if
I've lost control of the conversation completely.

"Do you have raisins in your pocket?"

"Nope."

"Did you bring raisins to school today?"

"Nope."

"So why do you have sugar in your pocket?"

"For my raisins!"

I give up. Complete, unconditional surrender. I tell him to clean
the sugar off the pillow and clean out his pockets, then we continue
with the morning meeting.

Baffled for days by this conversation, I finally figure out the
reason for Nequan's sugary pockets. We had been on a field trip the day
before I caught him with the sugar, and the cafeteria had packed boxes
of raisins in the children's lunches. Nequan, who clearly likes his
raisins with sugar, had been obliged to eat them plain. The next
morning, determined not to let the possibility of raisins for lunch
catch him unprepared, he had filled his pockets with sugar before
school. Had I been 6, perhaps I would have understood this immediately,
but during the conversation, my slow, clumsy adult brain just couldn't
keep up with his logic.

The fact that rigid connections and pathways have not yet been
burned into these children's minds also means that they write some of
the most moving and original poetry I've ever read. A 3rd grader,
recounting her bout of the flu, writes: "I shut the door/I saw the
bandit of paradise/I knew/this would happen/to my body/blooming like
the sun/when I got sick." Another, creating a fictitious character in a
poem, writes: "She has/keys in her/back pocket/she dreamed /she
had/puppies on/the step /drinking /milk /out of/the sky." A third,
angry for no reason she will ever tell us, suddenly reveals herself in
this poem:

One day I
saw two ugly persons.
I didn't know it was my mother.
She had brown eyes and brown hair.
You
all
know it
was my mother.
The next thing
I saw
was an
ugly man he
had black eyes
black and gray hair.
You all
know
it
was
my father.

The two months I spend every spring teaching them poetry and letting
them run down its corridors without restraints of any kind is not in
any of the curricula I've ever been handed, but those months are always
the time when I learn more about them than I've ever known, and when
they do their most creative and astonishing work.

I am not a Montessori teacher, neither do I work in middle- or
upper-class progressive schools. I have taught only inner- city
children in public schools where the standardized-test pressure is
intense, and the sense that there is little time to waste if we want
our students to catch up with their wealthier, whiter peers pervades
everything we do. There are many people—teachers, educational
"experts," politicians, school administrators—who would say that
two months of poetry, a morning spent discussing Greek and Roman
mythology, even a short and mystifying conversation with a student, are
all stealing valuable time from the curriculum. But I honor my students
too much to believe that every minute of school time should be spent
thinking in the narrow ways that a curriculum writer far away in an
office has determined they should think.

These times are essential to the kind of classroom I
want to create, where their curiosity is given as much space as they
need it to have, as much air as they need for their exploration of
the world to survive.

My classroom is a far better place when I listen to my children: to
a question I have never imagined, a request for information that is not
going to be on any test but that they just want to know because they
are curious and at this very moment it is important, or to a
conversation that leaves me puzzled but sometime later opens a window
into the way they think, and in turn, makes me a better teacher for
them. Most of all, I won't be responsible for hurrying my children out
of that age when so many things are interesting and so much is new, and
when their desire to learn is pure and not corrupted by the rewards we
offer and the punishments we threaten if they do not learn what we want
them to learn when we want them to learn it.

All of this should not be taken to mean that we spend all day in my
classroom carelessly chatting about whatever pops into my students'
minds. We work very hard: My children have learned to read this year,
they are good at math, they've learned some history and some science,
too. It's just this: If at the end of the day, I find Reginald standing
at the window instead of reading at his seat, and I see that he is
wide-eyed and absolutely entranced by a squirrel in a tree in the yard,
I will not call to him to sit down and pick up his book. In fact, I
might even join him there for a moment and remember what it feels like
to be amazed by a squirrel.

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